Articles

The Underachiever #17: Half-Life 2

Games are virtual. When you turn on the console, a world appears; when you turn it off, no trace remains. Except for the achievements you earned -- which fortify your Gamerscore and self-esteem, blip by blip. The Underachiever tracks the productivity of one gamer playing to catch up to his peers. What do games feel like when they're used for work?

The Third Feeling

For the final edition of this column, I'm replaying Half-Life 2. At this time, Gordon Freeman is frozen on an airboat whose nose is pointed away from City 17. His eyes are staring at the red farmhouse, where memory tells me zombies are standing. The next time I pick up the controller, I'll push Gordon forward into the ambush and this moment will dissolve into a familiar series of reflexes, a physical echo of the first time I played Half-Life 2. But this also feels different.

The first time was a broken experience. A video stutter derailed my game once every 30 seconds. I'd shoot a Combine soldier in the helmet, listen and watch as the glitch diced my gunshot into a half-dozen equal pieces, shoot again, and repeat. Half-Life 2 slowed to a crawl. But it kept its integrity (it did for me, anyway -- other fans experiencing the bug threatened to sue Valve). The world had incredible mystery. Where had Gordon been since the end of the first game? Who was the G-Man? What was inside the Citadel overlooking City 17? What year was this? What was about to happen? The narrative pulled me through the game and the pain of physically playing it.

This time, on the Xbox 360, the game has a hard time maintaining that sense of mystery. I know the ending, of course. But the illusion of integrity is also fading from Half-Life 2. Achievements appear on occasion and expose all the game's tricks. You might have certain memories of the world. In the opening minutes, a Combine guard knocks over a can and tells you to pick it up and put it in the trash before you can pass. If you felt afraid, you did as you were told; if you felt angry, you threw the can at his helmet, and it bounced off with a clang.

In the age of achievements, you have a third feeling -- a nagging sense that you have to do something. You throw the can at the Combine soldier's head, and it makes a clang. He chases you down and gives you a few lashes of his baton. Nothing else happens. You throw the can again, and are beaten down again. But this time, he stands aside and tells you to get out. The achievement, 5G: Defiant, pops up on the screen, blocking your view for a second. You feel a kind of worn satisfaction. At one time, this moment had a private and unspoken meaning. It made you wonder about the world. Now, the moment has a name and a number, and it only makes you wonder about the other achievements.

Valve is too smart not to sense this. So Half-Life 2 -- and possibly the whole Orange Box -- might be the only game on the Xbox 360 where achievements don't make a sound. You usually look forward to that lovely blip, which says you did something great. This threatens the integrity of the Half-Life 2 narrative, which actually wants you to feel uncertain about the role you play in the world. What does the G-Man intend for you? What more accidents will you cause? Imagine the bright sound of your achievement in the atmosphere of Half-Life 2. The game's clinical sounds -- the dry hiss of a health pack, the throb and hum of an HEV charge dispenser, the little burp that says you can't open a door -- are crucial to the setting. It would be wrong to break the integrity of that science fiction by intercutting it with metagame reminders.

Problem is, the silence is more deafening. The gray pop-ups spell out what the story won't tell. I should be disappointed by the airboat, which characters have been telling me is my one ticket out of the city. It's a rickety raft I must awkwardly steer into the city's canals, where I'm surrounded by dark water and completely exposed to danger. I should feel ambivalent about where I've found myself. But the 5G: Anchor's Aweigh! achievement celebrates me. I've made progress, I'm winning at the game, I'm great.

The positive reinforcement hides in other corners, too. I win 5G: Barnacle Bowling for taking out five barnacles with one exploding barrel. This is a surprise, because the barnacles don't represent a major plot point -- they represent the emergent aspect of Half-Life 2, how enemy and object physics allow me to improvise my own achievements. Think of Bulletstorm and Far Cry 2. But take a closer look at this scenario: Barnacle bowling is allowed to happen in a specific section of a certain hallway, where the five barnacles and one barrel have been specially set up for me. And while I might have chosen to forgo this opportunity and tiptoe past the barnacles, Half-Life 2 strongly suggests that the exploding barrel is the way to go. I don't really have much room to maneuver; the barnacles will be bowled. And so, like the airboat, I'm meant to stumble upon this moment and feel as if I made it. The official stamp of achievement actually feels patronizing.

So what's left of the game?

I go through the motions. These carefully packaged moments and hallways and rooms unfold like the pages of a storybook. I can no longer see Half-Life 2 as a world of possibility. I see it instead as a world contained -- one that I choose to dive into, one that I choose to exit. I leave Gordon standing in place like the folded corner of a page. And this is how I'd like to think of games, as things that I simply open and close.

Half-Life 2 still terrifies me, years later. In some places, a clever turn in the level makes me lose my bearings, causes me to panic as I'm beset from above by gunfire and don't know where to go. These are the moments of disorientation that allow me to lose myself inside the world again, thinking I'm in something much bigger than myself. But I am also comforted by those incongruous achievements because they bring me back outside the game. They tell me that I'm safe, in a world apart.

This dichotomy between real-life and game-life is disappearing. I have games on my phone, Gamerscore next to my name, and gamification on the horizon. I can't tell how to approach games -- or is it the other way around? It's no surprise that blockbuster games are more and more expensive, that they have an increasingly harder time immersing us, and that 3D will probably be the next zeitgeist. The visions in games won't stop at the screen; they will appear in all the spaces between. And in that future, I'm still not sure where exactly I stand.

Achievements earned: 5
Points gained: 25

Total achievements earned: 119
Total points gained: 1,575

Ryan Kuo is an editor at Kill Screen, and a freelance writer and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Find him on Xbox Live and Twitter as twerkface. He thinks his Gamerscore is fairly acceptable now.